Freshman and sophomore Program in Writing and Rhetoric (PWR) students held a videoconference yesterday morning with students at Sweden’s Orebro University and Uppsala University. Students in Alyssa O’Brien’s “Cross Cultural Rhetoric” and Christine Alfano’s “Cultural Interfaces” spoke with the Swedish students as part of the Cross-Cultural Rhetoric Project, which was piloted last year.

In yesterday’s videoconference, groups of three Stanford students communicated in intimate groups with three Swedish students, aided by an interactive whiteboard and an instant message chat.

In addition to fostering cultural understanding and learning, the project carried significance in the realm of international relations.

“I think as we move conceptually toward becoming an effective, peaceful global community,” Alfano said, “it’s really important to understand how we can use technology to overcome differences and to facilitate productive exchanges.”

Devoted to developing intercultural competencies through collaboration and the effective use of technology, the Cross-Cultural Rhetoric Project — which secured funding again for the 2007-08 academic year through the Wallenberg Global Learning Network — seeks to investigate the critical role that intercultural competence can play in global communication and international relations.

“In a time of instant global communication, we believe it is important for students to ... learn to view issues and problems from varying cultural and linguistic perspectives,” said PWR Director and English Prof. Andrea Lunsford, who is the principle investigator for the project.

“Working with students in Sweden is one way to broaden our ability to communicate clearly and sensitively across these divides,” she added. “Stanford students who have participated in the project report that their awareness of cultural differences has grown exponentially and that they feel much better able to communicate with people from other cultural groups.”

The project began with the goal of giving PWR 2 students real, live audiences for their research presentations.

“We thought that we would connect them through cutting-edge technology to present ideas and research to other students from across the globe,” O’Brien said. “But in the process, we learned that we had embarked on something more significant — an opportunity for students to understand, through hands-on active learning, more about the world and different cultural values, perspectives and beliefs.”

Though yesterday’s videoconference was successful, technological and linguistic issues made communication difficult for some of the groups.

“Technology was already a problem,” said Lleyana Jack ‘10. “But it was a lot smoother for us than for the Swedish students since we had already run through it. Language was also slightly a barrier since the students are not entirely fluent in English.”

Evan Romero ‘10 found the experience to be academically beneficial.

“It was a cool experience,” he said. “It was a nice opportunity to appreciate the diversity that they had — in their group, there were students from Japan, France and Sweden.”

The connections made in the classroom have led to further communication between the students.

“One of my students, Stephanie Parker [‘11], just visited my office,” O’Brien said. “She said that her group has been writing on each other’s Facebook walls all afternoon — now that’s a sign of successful cross-cultural communication.”

The project has expanded its use of asynchronous media — such as wikis and blogs — to facilitate deeper connections between students outside of the videoconferencing opportunities that they have in class.

The project launched asynchronous collaboration with the National University of Singapore, and Stanford students have been blogging with students in Singapore. Soon, students in Sweden will join the collaborative blog.

Organizers of the project hope to develop a Center for Cross-Cultural Rhetoric at Stanford that would be available to students in Canada, Australia, South Africa, Britain, Singapore, India and Denmark, in addition to Sweden and the U.S. In such a center, students could meet in real-time or asynchronously to work together on issues related to inter- and cross-cultural understanding. As technologies and the Internet continue to change and evolve, the future of this project is bright, according to administrators.

“In the future, we’re exploring ways to fold in technologies like YouTube and virtual worlds into our Cross-Cultural curriculum,” Alfano said. “We have even begun talking about ways in which to hold an international class meeting in [the online virtual world] Second Life in the spring, as a way of bringing all the students together in the same space at the same time, even if that space is a virtual one.”